Sentences with phrase «of the agape god»

Not exact matches

The gospel of God's grace in Jesus Christ frees the Christian from both these erroneous tendencies but only if Christians respectfully strive to follow God's commandments and practice agape love.

Family is secondary when people understand the grace of God and his bestowed mercies then they will have the power to forgive and the power to perfect «agape love.

And to not see God's love (agape) in all of this, is not going to protect God from who He actually is, it is merely to insulated us from having to deal with a true Sovereign.

If God is indeed agape, then we have reason to hope that God will look mercifully when viewing our woefully inadequate insights and self - interested truths and make far more of what we say and believe than we have any right to hope for.

The story of Abraham's intercession thus points to the central theme of biblical faith: the steadfast love of God — hesed, agape — that refuses to be frustrated even in the context of a most immoral society.

The doctrine that agape fulfils the human loves has a critical test in interpreting the sexual life, not because of the earthiness of sexual love, but because of its power to drive the spirit in seeming disregard of God or neighbour.

What Christianity proclaimed as the agape of God and the believer was rarely translated as pathos.

Nothing «turns into» agape, but love experienced in depth within the context of faith in God's agape becomes an occasion for gratitude, humility and the celebration which expresses the life of God's people in his world.

The agape of God in Christ brought a new wisdom, a new knowledge.

Does it not follow from this statement that biblical love (agape) refers to the presence and power of God himself.

From this standpoint we can see why it is inadequate to describe the agape of God only as the spontaneous, unmotivated, uncalculated self - giving of the Holy God, regardless of the value of its object.

... While the Principle of Redemptive Withdrawal is focused on the abandonment Jesus experienced as he experienced the Father's judgment on the sin of the world, it is nevertheless grounded in the truth that the cross is the definitive expression of the self - giving, mutual indwelling agape - love that defines the triune God throughout eternity (p. 778).

Jesus gave so clear a picture of what a life centered in the love of God and expressing itself in love for others would be that, when the New Testament was written in Greek, the meaning of agape was transformed.

He rang the changes on sin more eloquently than anyone of our time, but that dissection, set forth with particularly telling power in the first volume of his Gifford Lectures, was followed by a second volume in which his acknowledgment of the power of the gospel as grace made it possible for him to speak of «the agape of the Kingdom of God [as] a resource for the infinite development towards a more perfect brotherhood in history» (The Nature and Destiny of Man, II [Scribner's, 1943], p. 85)

Such humility does not exclude the ecstatic joy of receiving the Spirit of God, or the peace of agape with God and the neighbour, but it is joy and peace made possible within love's work of forgiveness.

I became aware that the love of God — hesed, agape — is more of a zigzag than a straight line.

In this tradition God has been thought of as creating out of agape which he has for his creatures.

When the self encounters the agape of God, it responds in contrition and gratitude.

The relation of God's love (agape) to individual and collective life in terms of justice was close to the heart of Niebuhr's thought.

The answer to this must be in any Christian view that agape both in God and in man intends the Kingdom of God, that is, the bringing of all things to creative dynamic harmony under the sovereign rule of God.

«18 When the pure love of God appears in history in Christ, the limits of history for realizing agape are seen, for Christ must refuse «to participate in the claims and counterclaims of historical existence.

The first is that since agape is given to an object not worthy of it, the Christian can not really say that he has agape toward God.

Niebuhr considered the relation of agape to the struggle for justice to be as profound a revelation of the possibilities of God's grace and the limitations imposed by man's sin as any facet of existence.

No human love, it is held, even the most idealistic, can be said to embody agape, the love of God, for human love is always limited and ambiguous in its object, and is corrupted by human selfishness in its essential spirit.

Our question concerning Professor Nygren's work does not involve any rejection of the idea that in agape Christianity has a conception of God's love which does transcend other religious motifs.

Sanctification is God's empowering of the new self for the performance of agape — an existential moment on the level of moral experience.

We said that in principle the good which agape seeks must include the good of the self, for the Kingdom of God does not exclude any good, even my own.

[157] Her award - winning first book, Journeys by Heart (1988), essentially blew the work of Anders Nygren on Agape and Eros out of the water by reversing the terms: God's love is not agapic, but erotic.

Brock identified agape love with the wrong direction of classical (patriarchal) theism in championing «disinterested» love, «dispassionate» love that includes no dynamic interrelationship between Lover and beloved and leaves God utterly unaffected by the creaturely response to God's love.21 Erotic love, by contrast, «connotes intimacy through the subjective engagement of the whole self in a relationship.»

It was Bernard of Clairvaux who said that God would draw the believer toward Himself away from mere (physical) erotic love, which human beings know, to agape, which is only found in Him.

In other words, blacks can not even begin to consider loving their white oppressors until they can experience a love of self and other blacks that flows from God's freely given agape.

This is agape, the kind of love God has for God's children.

To return to the positive notes in the message of Paul, it is of prime significance that in both Jesus and Paul it is the love of God that calls forth the human response of faith, of hope for this life and the life to come, and the requirement and possibility of agape love for one's neighbor in need.

As to Paul the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Christ are terms used interchangeably, so for most purposes and in most contexts the agape and the charis (grace) of God are identical, and both represent the love of God coming to us in Christ.

This agape of God has come to men through God acting in Christ, and is mediated through the Holy Spirit.

The Church is not the only group in which man is moved by agape and seeks its leading; but it is the one community which in accepting agape as the meaning of its existence places itself squarely under the judgment of the love which seeks one redeemed humanity in the Kingdom of God.

Catholicity applied to the Christian Movement embodies the kind of boundary - lessness that is implied in the Johannine declaration of God's love for «the cosmos» as the rationale of the cross; and it embodies, too, the transcendenceof all natural and historical boundaries that, however real, entrenched, and even humanly necessary, stand in the way of the communication of that divine agape.

It means that those who recognize the agape of God in the historical revelation can be thankful that it has come to them there, while they remember that it does not give them an exclusive possession of the truth.

Doing so ignores the fact that it took centuries of cultural transformation for the institution of Christian marriage, grounded in an agape as faithful as God's, to shape and discipline the love we call eros.

The true test of agape lies in the answer to the question: Does the love that begins in the free nature of God create in the object of the love the very freedom of its source?

Agape forbids self - justification; for agape is God's love given for men whose deepest sin is their assertion of their righteousness before God, and their attempt to live independently ofAgape forbids self - justification; for agape is God's love given for men whose deepest sin is their assertion of their righteousness before God, and their attempt to live independently ofagape is God's love given for men whose deepest sin is their assertion of their righteousness before God, and their attempt to live independently of Him.

Our question is how the love of God, agape, with its absolute self - giving, can fulfil the human loves without destroying them.

Expanding from a Jewish to a Gentile world the early church concluded that no legalism, Judaic or Gentile, was adequate to fulfill the gospel standard of agape, that the Kingdom of God was already present and yet to come, and that in living the gospel in this world with its political, economic and social challenges would require faithfulness and patience.

Christian ethics establishes the family as primary in all social relations based on the explicit teachings of Jesus and their implications that monogamy is the standard, agape the controlling factor, divorce a compromise, and our relation to God the foundation.

The decisive expression of agape has been given in the history of Jesus, and what God has begun in him is not finished (I Corinthians 15).

The relation of love to the intellect proceeds from three assumption: first, that faith transcends rational categories through God's self - revelation in Christ; second, that intellectual understanding is necessary for the guidance of human life; and third, that both seek the same object in God's being and His revealed truth — namely, that it is through agape with its consequent repentance, humility, and understanding of human limits that the intellect can appropriately function.

He clarified the ethical demands of a God - centered life by applying obedient love or agape to all human situations, both personal and social, and insisted this included the earthly as well as the eternal, and required our best actions amid the relativities of the present world.

It was like that OT commandment of loving the Lord your God and to love thy neighbor (which both used agape and not phillia) was a loaded commandment!

Without the Bible's eschatology, the God of the Bible can not be understood in terms of agape, the radical self - giving love of one who holds nothing back — not the life of his son, not the sharing of his own being.

Luther sets the agape of God sharply off against all human loves.